Truth Contestation on Facebook during COVID-19 in Austria, Czechia, Germany, and Poland

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Alena Kluknavská, whose interest is in truth contestation on Facebook during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; it approaches this through a country-comparative study involving several European nations (Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland). Truth contestation is especially prominent during crises, but we know very little about the dynamics between contestants in this process.

This can be approached through discourse network approaches, exploring how actors shape discourses of truthfulness and create binary divisions between the liars and the truthful. Such divisions often also map onto anti-elite antagonisms, and in doing so may be tied with populism.

The project gathered Facebook posts from party leaders in the four countries during March 2020 to February 2021, and created networks between the claimants and the actors evaluated in these posts; it performed this manual analysis for some 4,900 claims in these posts. Post-truth claims networks were considerably less developed in Austria and Germany than in Czechia and Poland.

At the centre of the Czech truth claims network, a populist radical right leader attacked the Czech government and the EU, as well as a number of other typical enemies of right-wing populists; counter-claims from government politicians defending the truth were considerably more peripheral to this network. In Poland, the situation is more complex, reflecting the more conflicted political environment there. Anti-elite claims networks look somewhat different.

Governments appear as central targets of accusations here, but the networks in the eastern countries are considerably more complex than in Germany and Austria. In the latter the debate was largely limited to elite political actors only, while in the eastern countries a broader range of participants were involved.